A Palestinian baby wears a Hamas bandana during a rally to celebrate the Israel-Hamas cease-fire in the Jebaliya refugee camp, north Gaza Strip, Thursday, Nov. 22, 2012. Gaza residents cleared rubble and claimed victory on Thursday, just hours after an Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers ended the worst cross-border fighting in four years. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

WASHINGTON — The conflict that ended, for now, in a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel seemed like the latest episode in a periodic showdown. But there was a second, strategic agenda unfolding, according to U.S. and Israeli officials: The exchange was something of a practice run for any future armed confrontation with Iran, featuring improved rockets that can reach Jerusalem and new anti-missile systems to counter them.

It is Iran, of course, that most preoccupies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama. While disagreeing on tactics, both have made it clear that time is short — probably measured in months — to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a military historian, likened the insertion of Iranian missiles into Gaza to the Cuban missile crisis.

“In the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was not confronting Cuba, but rather the Soviet Union,” Oren said Wednesday as the cease-fire was declared. “In Operation Pillar of Defense (the name Israel’s military gave the Gaza operation), Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”

It is an imprecise analogy. What the Soviet Union was slipping into Cuba 50 years ago was a nuclear arsenal. In Gaza, the rockets and parts that came from Iran were conventional, and, as the Israelis learned, still have significant accuracy problems. But from one point of view, Israel was using the Gaza battle to learn the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the group that has the closest ties to Iran — as well as to disrupt those links.

The missile defense campaign over Israel is being described as the most intense yet in real combat anywhere — and as having the potential to change warfare in the same way that novel applications of air power in the Spanish Civil War shaped combat in the skies since.

Of course, a conflict with Iran, if a last ditch-effort to restart negotiations fails, would look starkly different than what has just occurred.

But in the Israeli and U.S. contingency planning, Israel would face three tiers of threat in a conflict with Iran: the short-range missiles that have been lobbed in this campaign, medium-range rockets fielded by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and long-range missiles from Iran.

The last of those three could include the Shahab-3, the missile Israeli and U.S. intelligence say could someday be fitted with a nuclear weapon if Iran ever succeeded in developing one and shrinking it to fit a warhead.

A U.S. Army air defense officer said the U.S. and Israeli militaries were “absolutely learning a lot” from this campaign that may contribute to a more effective “integration of all those tiered systems into a layered approach.”

The goal, and the challenge, is to link short-, medium- and long-range missile defense radar systems and interceptors against the different types of threats that may emerge in the next conflict.

Even so, a historic battle of missile versus missile-defense has played out in the skies over Israel, with Israeli officials saying their Iron Dome system shot down 350 incoming rockets — 88 percent of all targets assigned to the missile defense interceptors.

Israeli military officials stress that most of the approximately 1,500 rockets fired by Hamas in this conflict were on trajectories toward unpopulated areas. The radar tracking systems of Iron Dome are designed to quickly discriminate between those that are hurtling toward populated areas and strays not worth expending a costly interceptor to knock down.

The officer and other experts said Iran also was certain to be studying the apparent inability of the rockets it supplied to Hamas to effectively strike targets in Israel, and could be expected to re-examine the design of that weapon for improvements.

Despite its performance during the current crisis, Iron Dome has its limits.

It is specifically designed to counter only short-range rockets — those capable of reaching targets at a distance of no more than 50 miles. Israel is developing a medium-range missile defense system, called David’s Sling, which was tested in computer simulations during the recent U.S.-Israeli exercise, and has fielded a long-range system called Arrow.

“Nobody has really had to manage this kind of a battle before,” said Jeffrey White, a defense fellow for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “There are lots of rockets coming in all over half the country — and there are all different kinds of rockets being fired.”

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